- FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD Warriors (Of The Wasteland) (ZTT)
- Week Ending 29th November 1986
- 2 Weeks At #1
Continuing the relentless turnover of #1s on my chart towards the end of 1986, the second single from FGTH’s second album duly became the second to reach the summit.
The general public, fickle turncoats that they are, had begun to desert our heroes in enough numbers to leave the Liverpool album floundering in the lower reaches of the UK Top 20 less than a fortnight after release, and so the underwhelming chart performance of Warriors.. (in at #24, a slight climb to #19, then a swift adieu) did not really come as a shock.
Which of course was all a tremendous pity, since Warriors… possessed enough of the classic Frankie DNA to pass muster as a credible successor to the likes of Welcome To The Pleasuredome (if not, admittedly, Relax or Two Tribes). The absence of Trevor Horn might have been keenly felt on Liverpool as a whole, but here the spirit of his sonic assault is very much alive.
The single mix is busy and multi-layered, accentuating the original album version’s bassline and chucking in the sequencers and percussion effects we loved so much on Relax. The 12″ extended mix, Attack, called upon legendary axe god Gary Moore to throw some wild shapes (no doubt appeasing The Lads’ rockist tendencies in the process). One wonders if things might have panned out differently had Warriors… been chosen as the lead single for the Liverpool campaign; it’s the closest FGTH get to evoking the rush and thrust (and the speed and sweat) of their debut album’s best bits.
As ’twas, the band’s star was terminally on the wane and after a third single from the album – the bright’n’breezy Watching The Wildlife – apologetically slunk into the UK Top 30 in early 1987, Frankie Said…..no more.
All told, FGTH enjoyed five #1s on my personal Top 40 from their seven releases between October 1983 and March 1987. The other two were #2s, not a bad record for a band who never made a bad record (at least in their lifetime, we will overlook the 90s and 00s remixes!).
Amazingly few discotheques provide jukeboxes 